Climate Change
- Thread starter dbphoenix
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FC - here is a message for you
Actually, stupid people know quite well that they are stupid. This accounts to a large extent for the hostility exhibited in posts like yours.
Scientists prepare to issue sea-level rise forecasts for NC coastline
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/14/4400646_scientists-prepare-to-issue-sea.html?rh=1
North Carolina scientists mapping future sea-level rise will have their last public meeting Monday before the group issues its much-anticipated projections this month to prepare coastal residents for increased flooding and more violent storm surges.
The science panel’s report will be the first of its kind in the nation. Rather than providing a single sea-level rise forecast for the state’s entire coastline, the scientists will issue separate projections for four different geographic zones within the state.
“I don’t know anyone who’s gone that far,” said Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Norfolk, Va. “In Virginia, that’s been a big head-scratcher for us.”
The segmented projections indicate the North Carolina scientists’ growing sophistication – and caution – in issuing pronouncements related to climate change.
Their last prediction – in 2010, that North Carolina’s sea levels could rise 39 inches by century’s end – triggered a firestorm of protest from climate-change skeptics and coastal developers. The scientists’ range was 15.7 to 59.1 inches of sea-level rise by 2100.
This time, the scientists are limiting their forecast to 30 years and employing methodologies not used in their previous report, which could reduce tidal measures of North Carolina’s sea levels. Predicting for four separate zones was mandated by the state legislature after the political fallout from the 2010 forecast.
The cautious approach could scale back sea-level rise projections in North Carolina by including tidal gauge readings from southern parts of the state, which historically have had the state’s lowest sea-level measures.
North Carolina’s final projection could be lower than those issued by states with different approaches. According to an early draft of their report, the scientists are projecting a maximum potential sea level rise of 12.3 inches in Duck by 2045, a figure that could change as the draft report is revised. In neighboring Virginia, however, authorities are preparing for an 18-inch sea-level rise by midcentury, Stiles said.
North Carolina’s approach is a relief to Dave Burton, an adviser to NC-20, a group of coastal developers and climate-change skeptics who say sea-level rise projections by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based more on ideology than on science.
“I am hopeful that it will be a substantial improvement,” said Burton, a Cary computer consultant.
Burton said the IPCC process is a “sham” and said he wishes North Carolina’s science panel gave less weight to the IPCC findings, which form the basis of the science panel’s estimates.
At its Monday meeting in New Bern, the science panel, working under the auspices of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, will review its methodology and make final adjustments ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline to issue its report. The report will be circulated among other scientists in January, put out for public comment March 31 and submitted to the state legislature March 1, 2016.
Policy guide
North Carolina’s legislature in 2012 barred any state agency from adopting a rule or policy based on any sea-level forecast other than the Coastal Resources Commission’s projections and said the CRC can’t adopt the science panel’s findings until July 2016.
That law makes the science panel’s conclusions the de facto basis of any future North Carolina policy for building roads, homes, bridges and for other planning decisions. The science panel is responsible for issuing “rolling” 30-year projections every five years.
In their early draft report, the scientists say sea levels could rise as much as 3 inches higher around Nags Head and Kitty Hawk than in the Wilmington area.
The early draft report says sea-level rise in Duck could be between 4.4 inches and 12.3 inches. In Southport, the range is projected from 1.9 inches to 8.7 inches. Those figures could change between Monday and Dec. 31.
The difference between sea levels in the northern and southern ends of the state are due to shifting geologic masses that are descending at a faster rate in the north. The tectonic shifts are caused by the melting of glaciers in the last ice age, and the gradual compression of sediments the glaciers deposited on North Carolina’s northern coast.
These trends play out over millennia and can be measured by geologists today.
“The historical rate of sea-level rise at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research pier in Duck has been a little more than the thickness of 2 nickels – stacked flat, on top of one another – per year,” science panelist Spencer Rogers wrote in a science blog post in 2012.
Rogers is a coastal construction and erosion specialist with N.C. Sea Grant, a coastal research and educational program in Wilmington.
Dredging a factor
In its 2010 report, the science panel based its single statewide estimate on tidal readings in one location, the town of Duck, near Nags Head. Because the state’s geologic land mass is sinking faster in Duck than anywhere else in the state, Duck has posted the highest levels of relative sea-level rise.
This time, however, the scientists are including readings from the Wilmington area, more than 200 miles south of Duck. The Wilmington-Southport area has the lowest tidal gauge measures for sea-level rise along the entire Atlantic coast.
Still, the Wilmington area is an important location to measure high tides, because that part of the state has tide gauge data going back to 1935, whereas Duck’s readings go back only to 1978 and are statistically less reliable.
Wilmington was excluded from the science panel’s 2010 report because the tidal gauge readings there are skewed by dredging in the Cape Fear River. This time, however, the science panel will make adjustments for the dredging impacts so that Wilmington can be factored in to the state’s sea-level rise report.
Dredging waterways inflates high-tide readings because so much more water rushes into the enlarged river channel. The Cape Fear’s 44-foot depth at the mouth is three times its original depth after more than a century of dredging.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/14/4400646_scientists-prepare-to-issue-sea.html?rh=1
North Carolina scientists mapping future sea-level rise will have their last public meeting Monday before the group issues its much-anticipated projections this month to prepare coastal residents for increased flooding and more violent storm surges.
The science panel’s report will be the first of its kind in the nation. Rather than providing a single sea-level rise forecast for the state’s entire coastline, the scientists will issue separate projections for four different geographic zones within the state.
“I don’t know anyone who’s gone that far,” said Skip Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch in Norfolk, Va. “In Virginia, that’s been a big head-scratcher for us.”
The segmented projections indicate the North Carolina scientists’ growing sophistication – and caution – in issuing pronouncements related to climate change.
Their last prediction – in 2010, that North Carolina’s sea levels could rise 39 inches by century’s end – triggered a firestorm of protest from climate-change skeptics and coastal developers. The scientists’ range was 15.7 to 59.1 inches of sea-level rise by 2100.
This time, the scientists are limiting their forecast to 30 years and employing methodologies not used in their previous report, which could reduce tidal measures of North Carolina’s sea levels. Predicting for four separate zones was mandated by the state legislature after the political fallout from the 2010 forecast.
The cautious approach could scale back sea-level rise projections in North Carolina by including tidal gauge readings from southern parts of the state, which historically have had the state’s lowest sea-level measures.
North Carolina’s final projection could be lower than those issued by states with different approaches. According to an early draft of their report, the scientists are projecting a maximum potential sea level rise of 12.3 inches in Duck by 2045, a figure that could change as the draft report is revised. In neighboring Virginia, however, authorities are preparing for an 18-inch sea-level rise by midcentury, Stiles said.
North Carolina’s approach is a relief to Dave Burton, an adviser to NC-20, a group of coastal developers and climate-change skeptics who say sea-level rise projections by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based more on ideology than on science.
“I am hopeful that it will be a substantial improvement,” said Burton, a Cary computer consultant.
Burton said the IPCC process is a “sham” and said he wishes North Carolina’s science panel gave less weight to the IPCC findings, which form the basis of the science panel’s estimates.
At its Monday meeting in New Bern, the science panel, working under the auspices of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission, will review its methodology and make final adjustments ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline to issue its report. The report will be circulated among other scientists in January, put out for public comment March 31 and submitted to the state legislature March 1, 2016.
Policy guide
North Carolina’s legislature in 2012 barred any state agency from adopting a rule or policy based on any sea-level forecast other than the Coastal Resources Commission’s projections and said the CRC can’t adopt the science panel’s findings until July 2016.
That law makes the science panel’s conclusions the de facto basis of any future North Carolina policy for building roads, homes, bridges and for other planning decisions. The science panel is responsible for issuing “rolling” 30-year projections every five years.
In their early draft report, the scientists say sea levels could rise as much as 3 inches higher around Nags Head and Kitty Hawk than in the Wilmington area.
The early draft report says sea-level rise in Duck could be between 4.4 inches and 12.3 inches. In Southport, the range is projected from 1.9 inches to 8.7 inches. Those figures could change between Monday and Dec. 31.
The difference between sea levels in the northern and southern ends of the state are due to shifting geologic masses that are descending at a faster rate in the north. The tectonic shifts are caused by the melting of glaciers in the last ice age, and the gradual compression of sediments the glaciers deposited on North Carolina’s northern coast.
These trends play out over millennia and can be measured by geologists today.
“The historical rate of sea-level rise at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research pier in Duck has been a little more than the thickness of 2 nickels – stacked flat, on top of one another – per year,” science panelist Spencer Rogers wrote in a science blog post in 2012.
Rogers is a coastal construction and erosion specialist with N.C. Sea Grant, a coastal research and educational program in Wilmington.
Dredging a factor
In its 2010 report, the science panel based its single statewide estimate on tidal readings in one location, the town of Duck, near Nags Head. Because the state’s geologic land mass is sinking faster in Duck than anywhere else in the state, Duck has posted the highest levels of relative sea-level rise.
This time, however, the scientists are including readings from the Wilmington area, more than 200 miles south of Duck. The Wilmington-Southport area has the lowest tidal gauge measures for sea-level rise along the entire Atlantic coast.
Still, the Wilmington area is an important location to measure high tides, because that part of the state has tide gauge data going back to 1935, whereas Duck’s readings go back only to 1978 and are statistically less reliable.
Wilmington was excluded from the science panel’s 2010 report because the tidal gauge readings there are skewed by dredging in the Cape Fear River. This time, however, the science panel will make adjustments for the dredging impacts so that Wilmington can be factored in to the state’s sea-level rise report.
Dredging waterways inflates high-tide readings because so much more water rushes into the enlarged river channel. The Cape Fear’s 44-foot depth at the mouth is three times its original depth after more than a century of dredging.
How the 'War on Coal' went global
Republicans are trying to prop up the industry, but the world is not cooperating.
Republicans are trying to prop up the industry, but the world is not cooperating.
It's hard to buy into the story line that world-wide demand is dropping for coal and thereby causing the coal problems in the U.S. (and not Obama's "War on Coal") when the facts exhibit that the last three years have had the highest coal exports out of the U.S. of the last four decades.
http://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t4p01p1.pdf
Coal is horrid stuff really. Burning it puts more radioactive material in the air than the nuclear industry. The mercury in the oceans is emitted from burning coal. The stuff just sucks and Obama is a world-class expert on what sucks. This is one thing I agree with him on.
Fight looms over $3 billion Obama administration payment to UN-linked climate fund
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-administration-payment-to-un-linked-climate/
The Obama administration can expect a knock-down battle with the next Congress over its announced $3 billion contribution to the United Nations-affiliated Green Climate Fund, a centerpiece of talks over a new treaty on greenhouse gas emissions held in Lima, Peru, last week.
“If they think they are going to get all that money for the fund, they’re mistaken,” a senior aide to Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., told Fox News. “You’re going to see us being more aggressive about not sending more money to the U.N. and elsewhere for climate change.”
Inhofe is the incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee in the Republican-controlled Senate that will be take office in January, and a vocal skeptic about the administration’s drastic climate policies.
He is not a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee that actually decides how U.S. taxpayer money is doled out. But aides point out that climate skepticism shared with other Republicans, and a hoped-for end to the cliff-hanger process of funding the government through catch-all legislation like the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” bill that passed late Saturday, give a real edge to the climate fund threat.
Skepticism about climate change funding, the aide indicated, would be a “top priority” of Inhofe.
Failure to honor the Green Climate Fund commitment would deal a huge blow to the aggressive climate strategy of an administration that has already announced that it will double down on its own cuts to carbon emissions by 2025, with 26 percent to 28 percent reductions beyond what it has already achieved.
Blocking the money also would give a possibly mortal wound to the increasingly Rube Goldberg business of organizing a global climate deal in the face of economic austerity, resistance from rising industrial powers such as India, and virtually no evidence that global temperatures have risen in the past two decades.
The Lima climate session that closed Sunday was already teetering on the edge of failure due to tensions between developing nations that want both drastic carbon cuts from developed nations and mountains of cash to pay for green projects on their own territory.
(More at above url)
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-administration-payment-to-un-linked-climate/
The Obama administration can expect a knock-down battle with the next Congress over its announced $3 billion contribution to the United Nations-affiliated Green Climate Fund, a centerpiece of talks over a new treaty on greenhouse gas emissions held in Lima, Peru, last week.
“If they think they are going to get all that money for the fund, they’re mistaken,” a senior aide to Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., told Fox News. “You’re going to see us being more aggressive about not sending more money to the U.N. and elsewhere for climate change.”
Inhofe is the incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee in the Republican-controlled Senate that will be take office in January, and a vocal skeptic about the administration’s drastic climate policies.
He is not a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee that actually decides how U.S. taxpayer money is doled out. But aides point out that climate skepticism shared with other Republicans, and a hoped-for end to the cliff-hanger process of funding the government through catch-all legislation like the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” bill that passed late Saturday, give a real edge to the climate fund threat.
Skepticism about climate change funding, the aide indicated, would be a “top priority” of Inhofe.
Failure to honor the Green Climate Fund commitment would deal a huge blow to the aggressive climate strategy of an administration that has already announced that it will double down on its own cuts to carbon emissions by 2025, with 26 percent to 28 percent reductions beyond what it has already achieved.
Blocking the money also would give a possibly mortal wound to the increasingly Rube Goldberg business of organizing a global climate deal in the face of economic austerity, resistance from rising industrial powers such as India, and virtually no evidence that global temperatures have risen in the past two decades.
The Lima climate session that closed Sunday was already teetering on the edge of failure due to tensions between developing nations that want both drastic carbon cuts from developed nations and mountains of cash to pay for green projects on their own territory.
(More at above url)
The warming that has already occurred is causing enormous damage all over the planet, from dying forests to collapsing sea ice to savage heat waves totorrential rains. And scientists realize they may have underestimated the vulnerability of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
Those ice sheets now appear to be in the early stages of breaking up. For instance, Greenland’s glaciers have lately been spitting icebergs into the sea at an accelerated pace, and scientific papers published this year warned that the melting in parts of Antarctica may already be unstoppable.
“The climate is now out of equilibrium with the ice sheets,” said Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida who studies global sea levels. “They are going to melt.”
That could ultimately mean 30 feet, or even more, of sea level rise, though scientists have no clear idea of how fast that could happen. They hope it would take thousands of years, but cannot rule out a faster rise that might overwhelm the ability of human society to adapt.
Given the consequences already evident, can the 2C target really be viewed as safe? Frightened by what they are seeing, some countries, especially the low-lying island states, have been pressing that question with fresh urgency lately.
So, even as the world’s climate policy diplomats work on a plan that incorporates the 2C goal, they have enlisted scientists in a major review of whether it is strict enough. Results are due this summer, and if the reviewers recommend a lower target, that could add a contentious dimension to the climate negotiations in Paris next year.
Barring a technological miracle, or a mobilization of society on a scale unprecedented in peacetime, it is not at all clear how a lower target could be met.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/s...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Those ice sheets now appear to be in the early stages of breaking up. For instance, Greenland’s glaciers have lately been spitting icebergs into the sea at an accelerated pace, and scientific papers published this year warned that the melting in parts of Antarctica may already be unstoppable.
“The climate is now out of equilibrium with the ice sheets,” said Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida who studies global sea levels. “They are going to melt.”
That could ultimately mean 30 feet, or even more, of sea level rise, though scientists have no clear idea of how fast that could happen. They hope it would take thousands of years, but cannot rule out a faster rise that might overwhelm the ability of human society to adapt.
Given the consequences already evident, can the 2C target really be viewed as safe? Frightened by what they are seeing, some countries, especially the low-lying island states, have been pressing that question with fresh urgency lately.
So, even as the world’s climate policy diplomats work on a plan that incorporates the 2C goal, they have enlisted scientists in a major review of whether it is strict enough. Results are due this summer, and if the reviewers recommend a lower target, that could add a contentious dimension to the climate negotiations in Paris next year.
Barring a technological miracle, or a mobilization of society on a scale unprecedented in peacetime, it is not at all clear how a lower target could be met.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/s...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
PORTLAND, Me. — In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.
Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.
But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth, scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that depends on it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/u...=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article
Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.
But a fix may not be easy. The Gulf of Maine’s waters are warming — faster than almost any ocean waters on earth, scientists say — and fish are voting with their fins for cooler places to live. That is upending an ecosystem and the fishing industry that depends on it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/u...=Full®ion=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article
The reduction in cod population has been occurring since the 1700s. It is due to overfishing and has nothing to do with "global warming".